Jorge Silvetti, Int'l Assoc. AIA

2018 AIA/ACSA Topaz Medallion for Architectural Education Recipient

Architecture’s future depends on its next generation of leaders—and the educators who impact their lives. The Topaz Medallion honors those who educate others to ensure architecture’s enduring excellence.

Born in Argentina, Jorge Silvetti has taught at the Harvard
University Graduate School of Design since 1975, serving as a gifted professor
and mentor, and with Rodolfo Machado has worked as a design leader in Boston since
1974. While his influence at GSD was most strongly felt from 1995–2002, when he
served as chair of the architecture program, he has propagated a distinct school
of thought among the design professionals who have graduated in the past 42
years.

“This is not a stylization of
architecture that is visually and immediately identifiable, but a way of thinking
about history, precedent, and the contextual complexities of architectural
production that has inspired generations of architects and educators such as
myself,” wrote Christian Dagg, AIA, head of the Auburn University School of
Architecture, Planning
and Landscape Architecture, in a letter
nominating Silvetti for the AIA/ACSA Topaz Medallion.

Currently the Nelson Robinson, Jr. Professor of
Architecture at Harvard, Silvetti leads design studios and delivers regular
lectures on history, contemporary theory, and criticism. His groundbreaking 1977
essay “The Beauty of Shadows” provided a compelling argument for how a
profession caught between postmodernism and deconstruction should proceed. Later
works co-authored with Machado that expanded upon his arguments have greatly
influenced his students as well as other schools of design nationwide. The list
of deans and department chairs who were former students, colleagues, or
employees of Silvetti is long and impressive.

“As chair
of the architecture program at Harvard, his emphasis on design as a form of
research, coupled with his expansion of the field of architecture to include
other design practices, had a profound effect on the discipline at large—an
influence that can still be felt today,” Mónica
Ponce de León,
dean and professor at Princeton University’s School of Architecture, wrote in a
letter supporting Silvetti’s nomination. “Through conferences, symposia, and
exhibitions, Silvetti brought allied disciplines in conversation with
architecture—long before interdisciplinary became a catchphrase in academia.”

Since 1986 Silvetti has overseen a number of research
programs, including an examination of Sicily’s urbanism and architecture that won
a Progressive Architecture award. Other projects have explored the future of
public space in the shifting metropolis of Buenos Aires and the future
development of previously industrial Bilbao, Spain. He is a recipient of the Rome
Prize, and since 1996 has served as a Pritzker Architecture Prize juror. In 2000, he was a juror
for the former Mies van der Rohe Prize for Latin American Architecture.

Beyond academia,
Silvetti’s work in association with Rodolfo Machado since 1974 and under
different professional firms that they founded and led (presently MACHADO
SILVETTI), has been widely celebrated. Run like a studio where all employees contribute
ideas and everyone shares in the
learning experience, the firm’s notable projects include work at many major Universities and Colleges in
the U.S., (among them Dartmouth and Bowdoin Colleges, Princeton, Harvard, Rice,
and Arizona State universities), abroad at the American University in Beirut
and the Vietnamese and German University in Vietnam, as well as notable
cultural and educational institutions such as the Getty Trust in the U.S. The
firm received the First Award in Architecture from the American University of
Arts and Letters in 1991 and numerous design awards and citations from AIA.

“After teaching for many years and participating in many
conversations, he stands among a select group of peers,” wrote Machado in a
letter supporting his partner’s nomination. “In fact there are only a few still
fully engaged in teaching, who have witnessed and indeed participated in the
wild swings of academic pedagogy—from the post-modern to the parametric to the current heterotopic panorama. Throughout all of it, Jorge
has been committed to teaching the core canons of architecture while
simultaneously supporting those innovating people and emerging projects that
benefit the core and expand the reach of architecture.”

Jury

Chere R. LeClair, AIA, Chair, LeClair Architects, Bozeman, Montana

Don Keshika De Saram, Assoc. AIA, AIAS President, Washington DC

Donna Kacmar, FAIA, University of Houston, Gerald D. Hines College of Architecture, Houston

Toshiko Mori, FAIA, Toshiko Mori Architect, PLLC, New York City

Nader Tehrani, Dean, The Cooper Union, Irwin S. Chanin School of Architecture, New York City